What Are Dorks, Geeks, and Nerds?

Great White Snark has provided a helpful diagram…or have they?  See it here:

http://www.greatwhitesnark.com/2010/03/25/difference-between-nerd-dork-and-geek-explained-in-a-venn-diagram/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+greatwhitesnark%2Fyqzr+%28Great+White+Snark%29

Because that link is super-long, I’m going to be a bad internet citizen and hotlink the picture:

I’m going to geek out a bit here (or is it nerd out?) and tell you why I think this diagram is wrong.  I don’t really care about this issue, but somebody has to say what I’m about to say.

Nerds, geeks, and dorks are all synonyms for dweebs.  They mean the exact same thing.  To suggest otherwise is pretty dorky, don’t you think?  I like the three characteristics in the diagram, but the reality is simpler — and more complicated — than it suggests.

There are different types of nerds/dorks/geeks out there.  We’re all familiar with the common ones — computer geeks, science geeks, socially awkward outcasts, total weirdos, etc.  But those are not the only ways in which people can nerd out.  In fact, there are geeks for just about any interest in our world.  We just know them by different names, i.e.,  “enthusiast,” “passionate,” or “fan.”  The only thing you need to be considered a geek is a large enough amount of interest in something, and that something could be anything in the world.  Don’t think so?  Search for anything on the internet, and chances are you’ll find someone with a larger-than-advisable interest in that thing.  We are all dorks.

So the core component of nerdiness is obsession, and the “intelligence” and “socially awkward” parts come from developmental stages of life (usually middle- and high-school), where certain types of nerds tend to be a) Really into being smart, and b) Really having no clue as to how to properly relate to peers unlike themselves.  When you become an adult, these characteristics tend to get smoothed out, just as non-nerds get interested in interesting things and geek out in their own way.  Remember when you got to college and 80% of people were on roughly the same social status?  Yeah, that’s because people grow up and adopt more nuanced social constructs.

It’s at this point that most people start self-identifying themselves as nerds about something, in order to find others who are nerdy about that particular thing.  The only people who don’t do this are people who are trying too hard to be cool.  Have nothing to do with them.

To be fair, the diagram really isn’t about any type of nerd, it’s about the specific type that everyone remembers from high school — male, white, unhygenic, generally nice, interested in technology and math, athletically anti-gifted, unpopular, Red Dwarf-watching, living in a strange culture that only they understand –  and it still fails, because like I said, these terms all mean the same thing.  Nerds, dorks, and geeks are all obsessed, intelligent, and socially awkward.  This is why Chuck can call its IT repair team the Nerd Herd and everyone associates them with Best Buy’s Geek Squad.  This Venn diagram should just be a single circle with a bunch of words inside it.

Man, I’m a dork.